When you launch, launch with a bang: DemoCampVictoria01 Rocked

Last night I live-blogged Victoria’s first DemoCamp and it was a huge success.  The place was packed.  We were in the presentation centre for the new Juliet condos that are going up on Blanchard Street.  The presentation centre is a lovely, lovely venue for event and thanks to Dave Chard, Wendy Pryde, and Jessica Pryde for being amazing hosts.

Mark Lise told me that he expected more than the 48 people there were chairs for and yep, that was true.  It was a packed house.  When this DemoCamp was being planned, Mark had arranged with buddies from Flock and Songbird (I’ve downloaded Songbird, btw) to give presentations, then in the couple days just before last night Mark said people came out of the woodwork to want to present.  This was a great problem to have, more people who wanted to present than there was probably time for.  As it turned out there was time for everyone.

Reflections on DemoCampVictoria01

One of the perils/problems with live blogging is that often you don’t get to synthesize what is going on until much later.  When you’re at a conference and still covering other sessions often this means not getting back to reflect on what you wrote about (and having only vague memories of).  Now a day later I’ve had some  time to reflect a bit.

Sure Flock and Songbird get a lot of attention here, but what about SkyscraperPage?  Oh didn’t know about them?  Have you seen the scale drawings of skyscrapers?  Chances are the drawings came from them.  That was one of my wow moments.  You’ve probably seen a lot of their skyscraper posters around.  I’m told a Vancouver one will be out this spring (it’s at the printers right now).

Joshua McKenty talked about the irony of pushing BountyUp for a long time, then in a few hours made BuyLater and is already making money.  It also helped that Lifehacker and others did some posts about him too.

Gels talked about her new project at UVic the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) where she is working on making a collaboration platform for academics to read and annotate scanned versions of texts.  We’re talking about texts hundreds of years old.  You know how hard it is to even to get to look as those kinds of documents much less discuss the contents in situ with people also interested in that time period?  Pretty darn hard is the quick answer.  There are a lot of cool things that can be done with a platform like that … once it is off the paper-alpha stage.  No matter what Gels thinks, it was great to see such an important project presented at its very earliest stages.

We were even graced with Boris Mann’s presence (here is his chat with Wendy via Utterz) and the Victoria premiere of Darren and Julie in Victoria!  Welcome back to Canada Darren and Julie.

So far Mark and Yule have posted their thoughts about DemoCampVictoria01.  I think since I managed to live blog and get pictures up last night, I’m allowed to have slacked off a bit on this post.

I can’t wait for the next DemoCamp, I have a feeling we’re going to need a bigger place and there are going to be a lot of people wanting to present once they hear how well last night went.

More pictures from the event:

www.flickr.com tris’ DemoCampVictoria01 photoset

Photography by Tris Hussey

We’ll be starting shortly here at the Juliet show-demo centre.  Geeks aplenty consuming wine and cheese…

This is, without a doubt, the swankiest location for a DemoCamp…awesome kickoff for Victoria’s first DemoCamp.

It was a great time. My Flickr photoset from Victoria’s first DemoCamp is uploading

Live Blog:

DemoCampVictoria01

(04/03/2008)  Powered by: CoveritLive

  

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6:00

Folks are just finishing their wine and cheese here at the Juliet demo centre. Â Boris Mann from Vangroovy flew over. Â Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo have made their first (I think) Victoria appearance since moving here recently. While Make Lise thought he might be having trouble finding presenters, in the last two days people have come out of the woodwork wanting to present.

6:00	Quick photo break and to make sure people take schwag … I do not want to haul it back to my apartment!

6:06	And we’re off …

6:13

Mark Lise is doing the intro … The person in charge of the Juliet presentation centre is talking about this new project. Â Â Yes, it’s a condo development, but it is also putting people in the downtown core. Â It is a catch-22 isn’t it … you need places to live … nice places. Next project is going to be at this location 834 Johnson–condos aimed at people my age, especially making that first downpayment. Boris Mann made a great point about designing small suites that could also be used as the home office. Boris–do you take stock in startups?

6:22

First up … The 30 second speils … didn’t catch the name (Darren thank you Janette) … programming Denbian “I only have 30 seconds dude…” Demo of songbird Josh Cognition.ca BuyLater and Timetracking … Dylan skyscraperpage Gels interface designer .. academinc research facilitated online Person to person lending sensor platform human motion for atheletes. Flock … ooh ahh.

6:26

We’re going to get a demo of the trunk build of Flock that was just pushed out minutes ago. Â We’re going to be looking at what will be coming in Flock 1.3. Built on Firefox, etc … I liked it a lot. Â But all I needed was the stupid WLW plugin to work in it and I’d jump on it. Â It does have a built in blog posting tool that is awesome. It is already on the trunk of Firefox 3 … the goal is to launch the new Flock with Firefox 3 in June.

6:28	Hey this isn’t working … oh you’re not online. Â Added Digg and Pownce! Â Native! Â This is the social browser. Â Discover and find as you go. Â Drag and drop stuff from sites to friends. Â Monetized on search like Mozilla … Yahoo, Ask, and others.

6:29	[Comment From Guest] Do they have estimated purchase prices of what the condo units would go for? This would be a consideration for a startup office / home environment situation. Definitely a good area to startup in though.

6:29	They didn’t say, but there is info here … try to post later

6:34

Matt … sensor net that tracks human motion. Â Small sensor, attach to something (person) MSB Solutions — company. Sensor is about the size of a deck of cards. Â The sensor currently measure power and velocity. This has been worked on for a year … this is targetted at strength and conditioning coaches …. “we haven’t sold any yet … ” Â Love the honesty.

6:35	The questions are great … everything from connect to iPods, weapons research, obesity studies, … here’s a great one … maybe an input device … yeah if it can do velocity and x,y … okay and z .. .. the air mouse!

6:36	Is that explosive or exploding atheletes?

6:39

Essentially it sounds like their markets are only going to be limited by their imagination … what do you need to measure on people who are moving. Â All kinds of ways to test things people do. It sounds like they are starting up … very early … but I bet they just got $1,000s of dollars worth of ideas here. Â Gotta love crowdsourced marketing!

6:40	Fortuno .. this is the person to person lending (I assume better than asking your friend for money). A lot of interest in micro loans, payments, etc.

6:45

fortuno.ca Jay and Jesse … Person to Person to lending. Â Like Kiva, but local. Â Canadians to Canadians. Â Bypass the banks. Â This is still an investment. Â You still pay interest, I gather. How it works—Borrowers post something like an ad on the site with a bit of a story. Â Lender can see story and some of the credit history. Â Okay, lenders don’t generally fund a whole loan themselves. Okay, concerns. Â Privacy and security. Using TransUnion to verify identity and check credit. Â “Bad risk” users aren’t allowed into the gate.

6:48	The story around the loan … the why is supposed to help make the loan process more human. Â These are unsecured loans. Â Key bit of info there …

6:57

Gels on ETCL etcl.uvic.ca … Why this instead of Google Scholar? Â Adobe? Â Both are large companies and have propretary stuff. Â The key is that as an academic … you have to try things open and flexible. Â Built on Ruby on Rails. Environment to research online. Â Manually scanned in docs from past (100s of years). Â Let people non-destructively annotate the documents. Â Collaborative learning. Public Knowledge Project (PKP) … UBC and SFU, open access documents. Â Pushing for open access to information and documents. Good question about expansion to use for archives and such later. Â We’re really looking at taking paper information and putting it together online so people can collaborate and annotate.

7:02	Dylan skyscraper diagrams. Â Basic stuff, but it works … and it’s here! Â Who would have thought the only site that does scale diagrams of buildings is here in Victoria.

7:03	Note to DemoCamp people … speak slowly and clearly when you open saying who you are.

7:06	Wow it is cool to see all the skyscrapers from different cities. Â Now this rocks … they sell posters of cities! Â Vancouver is the first, at the printers right now. Â Avail. in the spring. Â Posters are the money makers. http://skyscraperpage.com/

7:07	This is worth seriously checking out. … oops someone didn’t turn off their IM … should I or shouldn’t I

7:10	Josh is not going to talk about BountyUp … but Cognition.ca BuyItLater http://buylater.cognition.ca/ Â

7:14

Simple Firefox extension … took him 4 hours to code. Â Only wrote for Twitter first … email after Lifehacker-ed. Â Amazon US, Canada, UK. This is a rockingly simple idea … okay this is how it works You install the litte extension, you go to amazon and want to buy something, it’s out of stock or expensive. Â …you click button to tell you when it’s cheaper or in stock. Â That’s it. Josh is already making money. Â This rocks.

7:17

Songbird. Â Open source alternative to iTunes. Â Buy from the places you want, not just iTunes for example. I HATE iTunes … and need to get rid of it from my system. Â Windows media player, meh, not so married to it. Â This looks like another great Victoria born solution. http://www.songbirdnest.com/

7:17	Build on Firefox engine so like Flock and Firefox it’s built on extensions.

7:17	“It’s none of our business if it’s legal or illegal”

7:19	Music stores through web page API. Extensions. Â Scripting. Â JS, Zool, etc.

7:19	Also check out Josh’s new Twitter-based timetracking tool http://timetrack.cognition.ca/

7:24	Last up Darren, moldusD … I think … this is a database programming tool. Â Opensource. Â Language. Â Ouch, leaving the programming language for last. Â Hmm, maybe not the best call.

7:26	BTW Rebecca Bollwitt has a guest post by Raul on Michael Geist’s talk today at UBC http://www.miss604.com/2008/04/michael-geist-e-publishing-and-the-law-guest-live-blog.html

7:28	Darren has incorporated as a company so that he care earn a living from this. Â muldis.com … Man Janette is a great listener!

7:28	Time to wrap up here … Going to shoot some pics and video.

7:29	Wow this space is being offered for free for future events! Â Talk about great support for the Victoria tech community! Â Props to them!

7:29	Thank you for reading today.               Thousands of users. Millions of readers. Free and simple to use. Try CoveritLive today.

Although Josh thought I had forgotten about DemoCampVictoria in my last post about Canadian tech events I hadn’t but since it’s next week, now is a good time for a little update.

Checking out the wiki I see the following folks are on the docket to present:

Why DemoCampVictoria was created (Mark Lise)

Fortuno (Jesse and Jason)

Genetify (Andrew)

BountyUp - Social Commerce (Joshua McKenty and Todd Khozein)

DailySplice (Rian)

Flock - the social web browser (Clayton Stark and other flockers)

Songbird (Steven Bengtson and Peter Van Hardenberg) Source: BarCamp wiki / DemoCampVictoria01

I hadn’t checked out Songbird in a long time, but maybe it’s time to finally give it a look.  Flock?  Well, maybe.  Gotta see if I can get a couple extensions to work with it, but if I can–I might.

I my post on March 17 about DemoCampVictoria01, I mentioned that I might have some schwag to bring and, yes there will be schwag.  I have some b5media stickers (a few not a ton), some aideRSS t-shirts and honestly I don’t know what goodies are coming from Toronto from the b5media nerve centre–but I know I’m getting a swanky new b5 t-shirt.

DemoCampVictoria01 is at 5:30 PM, 834 Johnson St. (Juliet Living Demo Space, a.k.a. the OLD peacock billiards place).

Also coming up is the Victoria stop of the VC Roundtable led by Rick Segal.  We’re hosting Rick in the Garden City on April 21st.  It is from 8-10 AM at the Waddling Dog Pub on the Pat Bay Highway (if you’re from here, you know where I’m talking about).

Space is limited to 25 people so sign up now through Eventbrite for the Victoria session.  And thanks to Mark Lise for finding the Waddling Dog as the spot!

There are so many great tech events coming up (maybe I need to start doing the Upcoming thing again) that I’m just doing a quick post here with links to a few that I’ve seen recently:

• StartupNorth » Blog Archive » StartupCamp Montreal 2 - May 15th, 2008
• Drupal Camp Vancouver Set for May | Techvibes Blog
• Toronto tech scene in the papers » ThomasPurves.com
• DemoCampEdmonton (tonight!)

Of course if you have an event that you’d like me to know about (and therefore tell others about) feel free to drop me a line at tris [at] b5media.com (yep my old tris@ address works again, though officially it’s tris.hussey) or leave a comment here.

Now, if you’ll excuse me let me see how I can add an Upcoming thing to my sidebar…

Update: I went over to Upcoming.org and started marking events in Canada related to tech and such “I’m watching” and found a handy little badge there too.  If you’d like to keep track of the Canadian tech events that I find, my attending and watching feed is available for you.

Aidan Henry told me about Victoria’s first DemoCamp before I went to SXSW but told me to keep it under my hat until they had details set.  Since Gels has posted about it, I think it’s fair game now:

Welp, count me in! The event is free to attend, and it sounds like the round up so far is interesting (demo’s from the Flock guys in Vic, and an interesting new social commerce app called BountyUp). There’s one idea that’s missing that I personally think is really cool, called TeamPages; a social app that facilitates athletes, their coaches, and parents in organizing and scheduling teams (designed by MetaLab). But, that’s already been developed and DemoCamp seems more of a brainstorm-esque event. Source: DemoCampVictoria at Better Web Posse

DemoCampVictoria01 is April 3rd, 5:30 PM at the Juliet Showroom, 834 Johnson St (map).  Sign up on the wiki page to attend or present.  Myself I will be there camera and laptop in hands (it’s about 40 lbs of gear all together folks) to cover the event.  Now, to my beloved peeps over in Vangroovy, come on over!  I have a fold out futon couch, bunk beds (yes they are the kids’), and even a fold out fish bed (don’t ask).

As Gels pointed out, and Aidan posted about recently, the Victoria tech scene is nothing to sneeze at (or even cough at for that matter).  I can’t wait to see what is going to be demo-ed.  Hmm, maybe I should see if I can get some b5media schwag to give out.